The present invention relates to a passing vehicle time management system, and more particularly to a passing vehicle time management system suitable for the time management of vehicles passing a tollhouse on a toll road or the like by using communication units.
In a conventional system, a driver (user) of a vehicle running on a toll road or the like receives a road ticket from a toll collector or an automatic ticket dispenser at the tollhouse, and after the driver reaches the target exit, the driver pays the toll at the tollhouse directly to the toll collector or automatic toll receiving machine. For the toll transfer process at the tollhouse on a toll road or the like, the toll corresponding to each road ticket is checked for each vehicle and the same vehicle is not incurred the toll twice. With such a system, however, it takes a time to process the toll transfer so that traffic congestion may occur at the tollhouse.
To solve such problems, an automatic toll transfer system has been adopted. This automatic toll transfer system incorporates the configuration that a fixed station serving as a fixed communication unit is provided at a tollhouse on a toll road or the like, a vehicles running along the toll road is equipped with a mobile station serving as a mobile communication unit, and the toll is automatically transferred by exchanging information on the toll transfer between the fixed station and mobile station through wireless communications. For example, in this system, information on an entrance tollhouse and an exit tollhouse, information on a toll transfer and the like are exchanged through wireless communications, and the toll is calculated at the fixed station and incurred to the bank account or the like of a user (driver). Manual toll calculation and charge process are therefore unnecessary and the man power can be reduced. Still more, a time zone is set during which the communications from the mobile station to the fixed station is inhibited for a predetermined time (release timer time) after the toll transfer information is exchanged between the mobile and fixed stations. Therefore, during the predetermined time after the communication completion, it is possible to prevent the fixed station from issuing a communication link request to the mobile station and executing a charging process twice.
The conventional automatic toll transfer system, however, does not consider the case wherein a vehicle in an area communicable with the fixed station may stay long because of traffic congestion. If the vehicle stays in the area communicable with the fixed station after the mobile station mounted on the vehicle exchanges the toll transfer information with the fixed station, there is a possibility that after the predetermined time after the completion of communications with the fixed station, i.e., after the release timer counts up, the mobile station may respond to a communication link request from the fixed station and resume communications. In such a case, unnecessary communications are performed between the mobile and fixed stations and the communications may become congested. Furthermore, as the communications between the mobile and fixed stations resume, there is a possibility that the charging process for incurring the toll is executed twice for the same vehicle.